"The Piano Teacher" makes its Midwest premiere at Evanston's Next Theatre Company. Julia Cho's chilling play revolves around Mrs. K, a former piano teacher, and the events that unravel when she reaches out to two former students. Dueling Critics Kelly Kleiman and Jonathan Abarbanel give their reviews.

Chicago's About Face Theatre and Silk Road Theatre Project are among the 10 recipients across the country of the first National Theatre Awards bestowed by the American Theatre Wing, best known for Broadway's annual Tony Awards. Each of the 10 companies received a $10,000 grant at Oct. 25 ceremonies in New York City, hosted by Angela Lansbury.

Since its founding in 1939, the American Theatre Wing has been almost exclusively a New York organization despite its name. The Wing's modest annual cash awards to non-profit theaters went only to New York theater companies up until now. Revamping its rules for the first time in 53 years, the American Theatre Wing finally has become nationwide in scope by instituting the National Theatre Awards.

Non-profit theaters between five and 15 years old may apply for the grants. The Wing will look for companies which have articulated a distinctive mission and have nurtured an audience and community of artists demonstrating the quality, diversity, and dynamism of American theatre.

Legendary Chicago Blackhawks hockey hero Bobby Hull, "the Golden Jet," will make a one-night-only appearance in the Goodman Theatre's lavish annual production of "A Christmas Carol." The great star of the 1961 Hawks Stanely Cup team will don him now some gay apparel (in the Christmas sense) on Dec. 14, appearing in selected scenes on behalf of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Hull will accompany Charles Finch, 11, helping the Make-A-Wish kid fulfill his dream of acting onstage. Both Hull and Finch will wear special costumes, created just for them by he Goodman design team. This is the fourth consecutive year that the Goodman and the Make-A-Wish Foundation have made a young person's dream of appearing on stage come true. Following the performance, Hull will meet and greet audiences in the theater’s lobby, where signed copies of his book, The Golden Jet," will be available for purchase.

He won a 2007 Jeff Award for his puppet creations in Writer’s Theatre’s “The Puppetmaster of Lodz.” In fact his disturbing creatures great and small have taken the stage many places: Piven, Next, Lookingglass.

But Michael Montenegro, 57, doesn’t just work behind the scenes.

“I’ve spent most of my theater career performing solo,” he says. “But there are two separate prongs to my efforts. The solos are usually darkly comic and very flexible. But I also felt an ambition to make larger, more developed works, which is why I started Theatre Zarko ten years ago.”

Zarko’s current production, running through Sunday at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in Evanston, is a poetic, often chilling double bill complete with a small crew of puppeteers, live sound effects, and Jude Matthews’s original live music. Montenegro co-adapted and directed “Falling Girl,” and he wrote and directed “Haff, the Man,” which literally divides a soul in two. NOT recommended for children…

Montenegro started his career in puppetry at 7 or 8. Basically, his parents wanted to get their four boys out of their hair.

There are so many Chicago directors working in New York this season, it should be called "Windy City East." Goodman Theatre resident director Chuck Smith is there now directing "Knock Me a Kiss" by Charles Smith (different person/no relation) for the New Federal Theatre (opens Nov. 21). Playwright Smith is a member of the Victory Gardens Playwrights Ensemble. Then MacArthur "Genius" Fellow David Cromer begins rehearsals in January for a Broadway revival of William Inge's "Picnic" (cast and opening date TBA). Next, veteran Gary Griffin returns to the Encore! series at New York's City Center for a concert staging of "Lost in the Stars" by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson (Feb. 3-6).

Then, Steppenwolf's Anna D. Shapiro will stage "You Can't Take It With You" for an April Broadway opening.

As I reported many months ago in Chicago Footlights magazine, the hip-hoppin' Q Brothers are returning to Chicago Shakespeare Theater with "Funk It Up About Nothin," their version of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing." GQ and JQ, who still call Chicago home, will return to Chicago Shakes Jan. 21-Feb. 13 as a warm-up for a two-month Australian tour. The co-writers and co-directors first devised the show —their second rapping Shakespeare—in 2008. But even before coming back to Navy Pier (home of Chicago Shakespeare Theater) they'll take "Funk It Up" to the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York for one performance, Jan. 8. The Q Bros.' shows have enjoyed particular success in London and at the Edinburgh Festival as well as Chicago.

It's the time of year when "the bug" seems to be making the rounds of every workplace including theater rehearsal halls. Writers' Theatre of Glencoe has postponed the opening of "Travels With My Aunt" by nearly two weeks due to the triumphal march of flu and sniffles through the four-person cast and the company manager.

Director Stuart Carden estimates they lost a week of rehearsals and previews as they worked towards a press opening tomorrow night (Nov. 17). A weeks' postponement would run smack into Thanksgiving, so the decision was made to delay the official opening night until Nov. 30.

We also hear the production was going to utilize sound effects created live by a Foley artist, andthen it wasn't, and now it is again. Perhaps the technical back-and-forth also is a reason for delay. Fortunately, this adaptation of the popular Graham Greene novel is set to run through March 27, so the two-week delay won't appreciably cut the run.

Any theater writer can tell you there’s a mini-festival of Tennessee Williams going on right now ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at Raven; "Sweet Bird of Youth" at Artistic Home), or of Chekhov (Goodman’s "The Seagull"; Piven’s "Three Sisters"). But it takes the intrepid trend-spotters of The Front Page to bring you the news that J.M.